Challenging the barriers of the way we define reality

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A review of Suzanne Church’s “Coolies” in Elements: A Collection of Speculative Fiction (Edge, 2014)
By Derek Newman-Stille

War evokes complicated loyalties and dangerous moral questions. War involves the engagement of elaborate systems of propaganda that make moral choices seem easy, breaking down their complexity into black and white, good and evil, win and lose.

In Suzanne Church’s “Coolies”, the United States is at war with Canada, bombing Canadian stem cell research facilities out of their belief in the moral wrongness of the facilities. Marvin, convinced that he needs to protect Canada’s facilities, abandons his loyalty to family and duties as a father in order to continue his investment in his loyalty to the state, a loyalty he has been inculcating in young soldiers to continue the war effort. When his daughter, protected from the knowledge of who her father is, joins the military, he is put into the position of questioning his oaths or having to collect her body parts from the battlefield to graft onto other soldiers.

Church plays with militaristic ideas of loyalty (and complicates the notion that loyalty is an easy duty), “saving lives” (and explores the question of whether soldiers or doctors are best suited for the task of saving lives), and literally has Marvin see the world through new eyes provided by organ transplant.

Like the bodies on the battlefield, Suzanne Church rips apart conventional propaganda myths, revealing the corpus of stories that shore up the singular morality of war.